Testing the Readability of Your Blog

It’s more than just a test for keywords. It puts a page from your blog through a variety of tests that is, frankly, rather amazing. The content on your page is run through several reading level algorithms which test your content for a variety of factors and generate statistical information to help you evaluate how readable your content is. The tests include the Gunning-Fog Index, Flesch Reading Ease, and Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level.

The readability of your content is based upon how easy it is to read and at what grade level of education a person would expect to have completed in order to understand what is written. The tests are designed for the United States educational system, but could be applied internationally.

Newspapers used to be written in the United States for a 6th grade level. When that theory was developed, there were many immigrants and farming and industrial communities within the United States where the average person left school between the 6th and 10th grade to go to work. Today, the majority of people in the United States have graduated from high school (12th grade), and have at least 2 years of college or vocational training, though it isn’t an overwhelming majority. Yet, most newspapers today still aim for the 6th to 10th grade levels.

If you are reading your local newspaper, odds are that it is aimed for the 6th to 8th grade reader. If you are reading the Wall Street Journal, the reading level is much higher, aimed at college level reading. The editors aim for their audience’s reading level, not the statistical average of everyone in the country.

Should a blog, like a newspaper, have a unwritten rule to be written at a specific reading level? I don’t think so. Just as different books, magazines, and newspapers now write for their audience, taking their readability and educational level into account, so should a blogger.

The readability of your blog’s content should be aimed at your audience. If you are writing your personal journal and opinions about your day-to-day life as a teenager, the words should reflect your audience’s ability to read, which is most likely other teenagers. If your blog is writing about the technical aspects of finite stress analysis and structural engineering, it is definitely more likely that your blog’s audience will have at least four years of college under the belt and possibly a master’s degree.

Determining at which reading level to write can be tricky. Writing under the readability level of your audience can hurt. While it may help to simplify your words in order for people to understand what you are talking about, if your average audience reader is of a higher reading level, they can feel insulted and easily dismiss your content. Writing above your readers reading level can make you look arrogant and pompous.

You might not be thinking about the reading skills of your audience, but now is your chance. This readability test is a good way to find out how you are writing and who you are writing to.

Understanding the Readability Tests

It has been a very long time since my English classes at University, so I had to do some research to determine what these readability test results meant. It’s not a perfect science but it will give you some information about your blog’s readability. Here is a synopsis:

Gunning-Fog Index: An estimate of the number of school years it takes for someone to understand the content. The lower the number, the more easily understood the content. The higher the number, the more education is required to understand the content. Since 12 years is to high school graduation and 16 or 17 includes a 4 year college graduation, anything beyond 17 is considered post-graduate levels.

Flesch Reading Ease: Represents an index number that rates the text on a 100-point scale. Higher scores means higher readability and easier comprehension. For example, a 70 would be more readable by the majority of people than a 20.

Flesch-Kincaid grade level: Another test that determines the number of years of school required to read the content, like the Gunning-Fog index. It just uses a different method to get there, which could result in negative numbers, which are reported as zero, and numbers over twelve are reported as twelve, focusing on high school levels.

So I’m curious. Take the test and see what it has to say about your blog and tell us about it. If you are familiar with these readability tests, and I haven’t explained it well, tell us more about what you know.

I recommend you submit and test the front page URL/address of your blog first. Most blogs feature more than one post on the front page, and this will give you a better overall judgment of the readability of your entire blog. If your web page design uses excerpts or only a couple posts, run this test through 5 or more of your posts on various subjects to get a better estimate of the overall writing style you use on your blog.

Note: Mandarine has taken these tests one step further and tested the tests for readability. Check it out to see what you think about her tests of the readability tests.

I’m really not sure what this says about anything, to tell the truth, as I rarely think about the literacy levels of my readership and don’t consider this factor to be meaningful when I create posts. I figure that blogs are rather self-filtering in this regard; if you like my content and can read me, you’ll stick around, but if my writing style or level just “isn’t you”, there are plenty of blogs out there for you.

Does it really matter how many polysyllabic words I use to deliberately obfuscate my prose? I dunno…. Good grammar, spell chekcing and content are of more inportance to me personally (grin).

Besides, in blogs, we rarely write in the same way as we would if writing a dissertation or even a magazine article. Blogs have their own nuances and rhythms. I think they’re a genre all their own….

From WTJ’s remark, I gather that spelling and grammar have nothing to do whatsoever with the above tests. Or the tests are smart enough to tell us that it takes 6.37 years of chinese school to read WTJ’s blog (which I readily admit would be a minimum for me).

Interesting question, Petit. Is it good? Well, it depends. If it matches your expectations for your audience, then it’s perfect. If it is too low, then that’s something to consider. If it is too high, then that’s something else to consider.

As for posts with non-English text, I don’t believe that’s a fair test of the readability tests. I’m sure that skews things, but I’ve not tested it.

So what have you all learned from doing this test? Will it change how you write in the future?

In answer to your question, Lorelle, no, this won’t change the way I write. Really, it was quite reassuring. I liked knowing that my writing isn’t that hard to navigate. In the end, I suspect that words like readable and accessible don’t necessarily mean the writing is unsophisticated or uninteresting but rather describe writing that welcomes a variety of people. And that’s what I’d like to do — I’d like to reach the reader who’s curious about ideas and beauty, has a sense of humor and can be as courteous and kind online as their mothers expected them to be when they were growing up. That includes a diverse group of people, from many continents, speaking many different languages, much to my delight.

Looks good to me. Will it change the way I write? I don;t think so. Plus there really isn’t any reason to, If according to the above results, I’m this readable. Now all I have to do is actually find meaningful stuff to write about and get readership up.

Readablity? I always feel like the loser, even if I ace a test, which is rare. This being more of a “gage” of how others can percieve what we present…is there one of these tests for artistic merit? One more test to make me feel moronic.

This test really can’t be taken too seriously, as the site itself points out that sidebar content is included. A long blogroll, short post titles and multiple times and dates are going to push your average words per ‘sentence’ right down.

I’m quite happy to be told my blog is understandable by a fifth-grader, I’m just not convinced it’s true. I mean, I used the word ‘egregious’ the other day.

Why does it look like everybody takes the results from these obscure algorithms as a trustworthy indicator of a blog’s readability, without asking what is in them ?

As mentioned by Luminous in Cornell Finch’s blog, and brilliantly shown by WTJ in these comments above, running the tests on non-english blogs gives ok results – this is proof enough that the algorithms are at least ‘garbage-in/garbage-out’, if not worthless altogether.
The fact that grammar and spelling are left unchecked tells me that the scope of use for these indicators is at most extremely narrow.

Let’s be honest – I believe these indicators are as worthless as psychology tests you take in women’s magazines. The only thing the Gunning Fox index tells about your blog is how much it scores on the Gunning Fox index – period.

The whole purpose of this was to get you thinking about your blog’s audience. Did it?

The tool is just a test, with admitted flaws, to help you examine the general readability of your blog. If you really want to test it properly, create a couple of straight HTML pages on your site with no sidebar, header, or footer, just examples of your blog posts, and point it towards them. That would give you a clearly more accurate view on whether or not the tests are right.

If you are thinking about your blog’s audience and readability, then this works. The test is just a tool to get you thinking in that direction.

As for the issue of non-English, I don’t have access to the algorithms, so why don’t you ask them if it takes spelling and language into account. And look around and see if there are similar tests in different languages. That would be cool!

Sorry, I did not mean to be rude. Yes, I believe the tools help one think about readability – but I still do not trust any of the results. In my opinion, short sentences or short words hardly help readability: think about newspaper headlines and how long it often take to grasp the meaning (http://littlecalamity.tripod.com/Text/Newspaper.html). I believe it is the other way around: it is long convoluted sentences and complicated words that hamper readability.

I will try to gather more information on readability evaluation algorithms and keep you posted on the subject.

I found this very interesting but really don’t know what to make of any of it. I am a little bit skeptical about how they figure the bible, TV guide and Mark Twain have similar readability though. I’ve never been reading a Mark Twain book and thought ”Gaw! This is like reading the bible!”

Does anybody know if they analyze the homepage on a site but not ALL the pages combined?

[…] Another post courtesy of Lorelle. This one’s not a Blogging Challenge as such, it is a test of the readability of your blog. I’m not going to go into the specifics. Lorelle has done a really good job (as usual!) of explaining so go read the post to get the full gen. […]

[…] This morning as I was minding my own business, blog surfing I came by this post on Blog Readabilty by Cornell Finch, springing from this post by Lorelle VanFossen. Gez Lemon, owner of Juicy Studio, whose mission is to promote best practice for web developers in a fast moving industry, created Juicy Studio Readability Test to test the readability of your blog or website using a couple of complex algorithms to track how much schooling is required to able to understand all the drivel you’ve written. […]

[…] In a recent post, Lorelle on WordPress has gathered interesting resources on readability test tools. She invited her readers to have a go with the tools and post the results. So I’m curious. Take the test and see what it has to say about your blog and tell us about it. […]